The Party’s Over is a must-see for anyone already taken with That Kind Of Girl, another Flipside exploitation reissue dealing with early 1960s London youth culture. This latter film and another being newly issued alongside Oliver Reed’s beatnik blow-out called The Pleasure Girls (1965), were directed by Gerry O’Hara. The Pleasure Girls is an alternative take on swinging London, showing a group of young women and a gay man sharing accommodation, and on the whole not having a particularly groovy a time. Klaus Kinski plays a Rachman type figure and sugar-daddy to one of the girls, extorting money from poor tenants and gambling the night away at swish clubs. The bright lights of Sloane Square and elsewhere prove less glamorous close up than from a distance. Everything about The Pleasure Girls, apart from the title and Kinski’s over-acting, is downbeat — and serves to expose the myth of swinging London to be a media construct that attempts to paper-over the reality of capitalist exploitation and alienation.

What particularly grooves me about the Flipside releases is not simply the way the series is making available (and sometimes for the first time) a slew of entertaining movies, but the value of all the films as social documents. If you’re interested in British youth culture or London in the 1960s, then you need to see both The Party’s Over and The Pleasure Girls. Aside from being consistently entertaining movies, the various Flipside releases and their carefully chosen extras give us a much-needed alternative take on British social history during the sixties and seventies.

Tokyo Vice receives its UK publication in July. The story of a gaijin cub reporter attached to Japan’s largest newspaper (no mean feat in a hermitically-sealed and jealously guarded profession), it details and depicts a lurid world of blind eyes turned by government to human trafficking and worse. The unlikely figure of Adelstein, a Jewish American, is given the kata (way/drill) by the paper’s veteran crime reporter Inoue in one memorable section on his first assignment out in the sticks of Greater Tokyo:

One. Don’t ever burn your sources. If you can’t protect your sources, no one will trust you. All scoops are based on the understanding that you will protect the person who gave you the information. That’s the alpha and omega of reporting. Your source is your friend, your lover, your wife, and your soul. Betray your source, and you betray yourself. If you don’t protect your source, you’re not a journalist. You’re not even a man.
Two. Finish a story as soon as possible. The life of news is short. Miss the chance, and the story is dead and the scoop is gone.
Three. Never believe anyone. People lie, police lie, even your fellow reporters lie. Assume that you are being lied to, and proceed with caution.
Four. Take any information you can get. People are good and bad. Information is not. Information is what it is, and it doesn’t matter who gives it to you or where you steal it. The quality, the truth of the information, is what’s important.
Five. Remember and persist. Stories that people forget come back to haunt them. What may seem like an insignificant case can later turn into a major story. Keep paying attention and see where it goes. Don’t let the constant flow of new news let you forget about the unfinished news.
Six. Triangulate your stories, especially if they aren’t an official announcement from the authorities. If you can verify information from three different sources, odds are good that the information is good.
Seven. Write everything in a reverse pyramid. Editors cut from the bottom up. The important stuff goes on top, the trivial details go to the bottom. If you want your story to make it to the final edition, make it easy to cut.
Eight. Never put your personal opinions into a story; let someone else do it for you. That’s why experts and commentators exist. Objectivity is a subjective thing.
And that’s it.

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Encountering otherness with Merleau-Ponty. * Against happiness. * Devaluing the dirty war by Adam Thirlwell. * “When we go out of our mind, where do we go?”: on dementia and the arts. * Launch of Darran Anderson‘s Imaginary Cities. * How Flaubert changed literature. * Worrying — a cultural history. * Dustin O’Halloran on his […]

“3:AM is opening fiction submissions for a short period. I’m looking for innovative, or formally challenging new writing. The opening date is today: 13th July 2015, and the closing date/time is midnight on 31st July (GMT).”

Susana Medina‘s brilliant Philosophical Toys will be launched on Friday 17th July at the Cock Tavern’s Function Room (23 Phoenix Rd, Kings Cross, London NW1 1HB). Introduced by Lorna Scott Fox and Joanna Walsh; followed by a screening of Susana Medina and Derek Ogbourne‘s Leather-Bound Stories. Be there or be sober!

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Selected writings by David Winters

A selection of Richard Marshall's End Times interviews published by Oxford University Press